Nothing Aside

Hamilton Opposes Miers

Alexander Hamilton, that is.  Here is a particularly relevant section of The Federalist Papers #76 that every senator ought to re-read.  Hamilton is explaining the benefits and drawbacks of each of the three options for dealing with appointments.  Those options, as he sees them, are: let one man (the executive) make absolute appointments; assign the duty to a deliberative body (the Senate); or have the executive appoint a nominee for consideration by the Senate.  Hamilton and the Founding Fathers chose the last of these.  Here is why:

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.

It will readily be comprehended, that a man who had himself the sole disposition of offices, would be governed much more by his private inclinations and interests, than when he was bound to submit the propriety of his choice to the discussion and determination of a different and independent body, and that body an entire branch of the legislature. The possibility of rejection would be a strong motive to care in proposing. The danger to his own reputation, and, in the case of an elective magistrate, to his political existence, from betraying a spirit of favoritism, or an unbecoming pursuit of popularity, to the observation of a body whose opinion would have great weight in forming that of the public, could not fail to operate as a barrier to the one and to the other.

He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

Of course Hamilton foresaw a stronger balance between the branches of government, not a balance between two parties (which had not yet materialized by 1788).  What we lack today is a Senate that sees itself as a check on the executive's less than qualified appointments.  Instead we see senators afraid to voice any opposition to Miers on the grounds of the obvious and blatant cronyism that earned her this nomination, and instead deciding if they should oppose her because she might not be as far to the right as they would have hoped.  There is something seriously wrong with this. 

Honest Democrats should oppose Miers because the country deserves better justices.  Republicans should do the same.  The first questions every senator should clear up before anything else are: "Is the nominee qualified to fulfill the responsibilities of the office?  Is this person the most qualified person for the position?"  If not, the ideology of the nominee shouldn't even be in play. 

It seems both sides have forgotten Hamilton's sage founding words.

Be Reasonable!

The title, of course, is from Jon Stewart.  It seems that the junior senator from my (former) home state of Illinois, Barack Obama, has been listening.  Watch him put the left-wing crazies in their place.

Swagger, Probes and Indictments, Oh My!

Man, the Republican Party really knows how to pick'em. 

This week (month?) has been really bad for the GOP as the President has lost his swagger because of a natural disaster made worse by his administration's incompetent leadership, the Senate Majority Leader is "Bracing for Dual Probes" (who writes these headlines?) into his suspicious insider-trading-looking dealings, and the House Majority Leader has been indicted by a Texas grand jury.  For those of you keeping score at home, those are the top three officials in our elected branches of government.

If the Democrats can't turn this into a majority in both houses of Congress in 2006, nothing can.  I've never bought into the notion that the Democrats are "without ideas," since that's not really their first responsibility when they only have 44 Senate seats and a sizable deficit in the House.  The first objective is opposition - and with this administration and this Frist Senate and DeLay House there has been more than enough to oppose.  In fact I'm impressed Reid and Pelosi have kept up as well as they have.  But put all that aside.  Even if they are "without ideas," they will be running against, quite literally, crooks and scoundrels.  Talk about a gift.

Wanted: Fiscally Responsible Leadership

I missed Bush's Katrina speech last night.  That's mainly due to the fact that I don't yet have a TV in my new apartment, but partly because I already knew what he was going to say.  Today Andrew Sullivan echoes that feeling:

I guess I wasn't the only one who decided to skip watching the president live last night. Across the blogosphere, it seems as if many others decided to catch it later, or on the web, or just read the transcript. Why? Because I knew what was coming: an attempt at spiritual uplift, greased by billions and billions that we don't have, organized by a federal government that, under Bush, cannot seem to organize anything competently. I'm not saying we don't need to spend money on the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I'm saying I don't want to hear it from this guy.

It's almost difficult to get motivated in opposition to the constant screw-ups and almost intentional mismanagement perpetrated by this administration.  Perhaps that's the goal: wear down liberals to the point of exhaustion (Of course, The Onion was on top of this a while ago).  But how can we really trust this administration to do the right thing anymore?  Iraq is idling along at the same deadly pace, the federal budget deficit continues to grow, and as a Category 4 hurricane rolled over a city situated below sea level, this White House sat on its hands while refusing to play the "blame game" (note to the wise: the only people who don't want to play a "blame game" are the people who are usually to blame). 

But what's the solution?  Eliminating the Estate Tax on the wealthy so that those who are worth more than $1.5 million don't have to worry about passing on their extreme wealth to their family.  Adding another $200 billion to the federal budget for Katrina-related reconstruction while making no cuts in spending (note to senators: you "earmarked" $25 billion on the recent transportation bill for pet projects.  Look there!). 

Is this all a trap, as one of my more astute commenters has suggested?  Are Republicans just letting the budget get out of control so responsible Democrats will have to start cutting government?  If so, let's fall into that trap.  The myth out there is that Democrats are pro-spending and Republicans are not.  But look at this 100% Republican government that we've had for five years: massive additional spending - greater than the rate of spending growth under a Democratic Congress (if you can remember when that was) - but all on Republican-favored projects.  Republicans are spendthrifts just as much as Democrats used to be.  The difference is that Republicans insist on cutting taxes at the same time, driving America into even further debt. 

Someone needs to be responsible here.  Right now, the Democrats are the only ones willing to think about the future of this country.  Republicans may have wanted to starve the beast (they used to, I'm not so convinced of that anymore), but pretty soon America is set to die of fiscal starvation.  That may please the likes of Grover Norquist, but those who care about this country will be stuck with the dreary reality.

Conservatism Needs A Diet

Perhaps you heard Tom Delay's recent comment that there simply is no more fat to cut from the federal budget.  You may have been as shocked as I am, especially after Congress passed the most pork-heavy transportation and energy bills in history.  Just for the record, here is what Delay declared:

WASHINGTON -- House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an "ongoing victory," and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.
    
    Mr. DeLay was defending Republicans' choice to borrow money and add to this year's expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief. Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but Mr. DeLay said that doesn't seem possible.
...

Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, Mr. DeLay said, "Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we've pared it down pretty good."

The ridiculousness of this statement speaks for itself.  Anyone who has paid any attention at all to the federal government knows that the government is about as obese as your average American.

Here is what Andrew Sullivan had to say about it all:

This is what conservatism has now come to mean: the worst aspects of big government liberalism with the worst aspects of meddling in the moral decisions of people's private lives. And the people who have done this seem oblivious to it. I will remind you, Tom DeLay equated a balanced budget with fiscal sanity in the Clinton years. But now it's his budget, and his constituents and interest groups who get to feed at the trough, and the sky is the limit. A reminder to fiscal conservatives: today's GOP isn't just not what it used to be; it's your main enemy now. Conservatism has been hijacked by puritans and spendthrifts. Their unifying philosophy is meddling in other people's lives and spending other people's money.

Right on.  Real "conservatism" hasn't been a functional philosophy in the U.S. Government since the late 1990s.  It wasn't the philosophy I subscribed to, but at least it was consistant and honest.

Finally

I almost got whiplash when I read this headline: "Bush Takes Responsibility for Blunders":

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Tuesday that "I take responsibility" for failures in dealing with Hurricane Katrina and said the disaster raised broader questions about the government's ability to respond to natural disasters as well as terror attacks.

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," Bush said at joint White House news conference with the president of Iraq.

"To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said.

There is no reason why anyone should be excited about a simple statement like this, but we haven't seen anyone in the White House take responsibility for anything in the past five years.  This is a good start.  Hopefully he is being sincere and not just trying to put out the flames on his presidency.  At this point though, I'm too cynical to believe the former.

9/11 Vs. Katrina

Thomas Friedman comes out swinging - for the fences:

[I]f 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.

For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?

And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."

An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.

Harsh.  Remind me not to get on Friedman's bad side.  He continues:

The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.

I disagree on this point.  It wasn't that Rove assumed the rainy day would happen at another time and that it would be a bad thing.  It was that Rove didn't care how much rain we got and actually sought rainy days.  To say that they were just hoping for the best ignores the real motivations of Rove and his crew.

Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.

So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.

It's all falling apart for this Bush administration.  Katrina is showing the public just how lost this administration truly is. 

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy

Sorry for the lack of posts the past few days.  I have been in the process of moving to the D.C. area and haven't had much time to keep Nothing Aside as up-to-date as I would like.  In the meantime I've failed to give my two cents on some pretty incredible stories.  So as a catch-up, here is a quick round up of some of the big stories:

• Hurricane Katrina.  Wow.  Where to begin?  This is shaping up to be as catastrophic for the nation as 9-11 was, though the impact will be different.  David Brooks had a good column about the difference between the two though.  The human costs of this natural disaster are horrifying, but perhaps more importantly: tragic.  A major hurricane in New Orleans was inevitable and many disaster scenarios used just such a situation as their worst case.  But the federal government apparently did not.  This is incredibly inept.  It doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to see the parallels of Condoleezza Rice saying, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center" and President Bush's stunning quote from a few days ago: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."  Well, Mr. President, it seems that many experts did anticipate just such a problem - and none of them worked in your administration.  Instead of pros, you appointed Mike Brown as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  In his previous career, Brown ran, and was fired from, the International Arabian Horses Association.  Clearly this is the prerequisite you are looking for when it comes time to pick someone to head disaster relief.  As a result of the federal government's incompetence in responding to Katrina, thousands died.  Heads should roll. 
• Chief Justice Rehnquist dies, Roberts nominated for Chief Justice.  If there was ever an ideal time for a Supreme Court justice to die, the middle of a media storm centering on your administration's inability to handle the perfect storm has to be it.  With two Supreme Court spots to fill at the same time - and with one being the top post - Bush is sitting pretty.  He has the ability to push the court more firmly to the right.  While O'Connor and Rehnquist were generally conservative, they were old school conservatives.  With them out of the way, Bush can now nominate a whole bench full of Scalias.  While Roberts continues to be a mystery to just about everyone, we can be pretty confident that he won't be to the left of Rehnquist, the justice he once clerked for.  And, with Roberts still young at the tender age of 50, he could easily serve as Chief Justice for thirty plus years.  Yikes.  Meanwhile, Bush again can pick from his short list of confidently right-wing justices.  Back when we only had one opening, many thought it would be Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.  Then Gonzalez fell out of favor with both sides within a day for no particular reason other than he was appearing too moderate.  At the time I bought into the idea that Bush wanted to wait on nominating Gonzalez until he could make him Chief Justice.  Apparently that was a bad idea to buy.  However, I wouldn't be surprised if Bush took this opportunity to nominate his friend from Texas as the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.  But, of course, I'll probably be wrong.
• Gas prices are ridiculous.  Good God.  Today as I drove through College Park, Maryland, I momentarily got excited when I spotted a gas station hawking its wares for the rock bottom price of $3.19/gallon.  People, this price should excite no one.  It is, what's the word?, expensive.  There are some people out there who have long advocated a gas tax as a way to curb America of its dependence on cheap gas.  I am not one of these people since such a tax would hit the poor the most since it would be an incredibly regressive tax.  However, with prices the way they are, I would certainly rather be paying $3.49/gallon (the more common price around here) with half of it going to boost federal revenues than half of it going to the belly of the beast that is the backwards looking oil-focused energy industry.
• We're losing Iraq. Oh, you forgot about Iraq?  With all this other stuff going on, it's easy to forget that American soldiers continue to die over there.  Frankly, that's what the White House was hoping would happen.  The administration's incompetence on Iraq was nearing a tipping point.  Luckily for them, a brand new disaster gave them a bit of a respite.  Meanwhile there is no respite for the American soldier who is part of a mission in Iraq that has just enough troops to keep us from losing and just enough to keep us from winning.

And for those of you who are still hopelessly committed to backing this inept administration, I'm sure there will soon be fewer uncomfortable pictures of the dead and dying in [Iraq, the streets of New Orleans] and more stories about all the schools, hospitals and water treatment plants that are opening...

Fiddling While The Poor Get Poorer

We have a war with no end in sight going on in Iraq with a couple of American soldiers dying each day.  We have gas prices pinching Americans in the wallet across the country.  We have a Category  4 hurricane pummeling a section of America that was below sea level in the first place.  All of these problems cost a ton of money and each should demand the attention of our president.  While hurricanes are unavoidable, wars of choice and surging energy prices are not.

All the while our president is on vacation and the richest Americans are enjoying their absurdly large tax cuts.  The poor, on the other hand, are living a different tale.  You can almost hear Nero's fiddle:

WASHINGTON (AP) --The nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.

The percentage of people without health insurance did not change.

Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003.

Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty -- from 11.8 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year. The poverty rate among the elderly declined as well, from 10.2 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year.

The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold -- 11.3 percent of the population.

So there hasn't been a decline in overall poverty since Bill Clinton was president.  This would suggest to me that the reduction in poverty is due to the policies choices made by the president.  This, in turn, would suggest that poverty reduction is an option that the current president has chosen not to act on.  Draw your own conclusions as to why that is.    

No Exceptions

It is becoming clear that high gas prices are here to stay.  After passing an energy bill that was essentially a handout to big oil-focused energy companies, Congress and the Bush administration have done little in response to skyrocketing prices at the pump.  So it was a relief yesterday when the Bush administration announced it would push for new fuel economy rules... kind of.

Light pickup trucks, minivans and sport utility vehicles would have to meet new minimum fuel-economy standards under rules proposed yesterday by the Bush administration.

But gas-guzzling Hummer H2s, Ford F350 pickups and other heavy roadhogs would be exempt from the new rules because it would be too much of a burden on automakers to dramatically change those vehicles' designs, administration officials said.
The new fuel efficiency standards – for truck-like vehicles weighing less than 8,500 pounds – were hailed by Department of Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta as a way to conserve 10 billion gallons of gasoline in coming years.
"The plan will save gas and result in less pain at the pump for motorists," he said.

This is nothing short of stupid.  Every car on the road should have fuel economy standards it should have to meet.  And of all the vehicles on the road today and in the future, the huge gas guzzlers should be the first to have regulations. 

A "burden on automakers" is a bunch of nonsense.  If designers are unable to make huge vehicles that can meet some basic standards of fuel economy, those vehicles just should not be on the road, polluting our air, gulping down expensive and increasingly rare oil or taking up spots at a gas station as their 50 gallon tanks are topped off.  An 8,500 pound vehicle is not only unnecessary, but it is a threat to other reasonably sized cars.

We need some common sense in our energy/environmental policy here.  Fuel economy is the first step towards success on domestic energy policy, foreign policy and national security.  There should be no exceptions.